DENVER—The Wireless Multimedia Forum ceased operations early this year, and its more than 60 members have moved on to work with other standards bodies, including the Third Generation Partnership Project and the Internet Streaming Media Alliance.
“The WMF will be ending operations shortly,” the group’s program director, Nancy Moss, wrote in a February e-mail to WMF members obtained by RCR Wireless News. “Several companies have asked recently whether the Interoperability Test efforts will continue in any form. Interop testing was a primary focus of WMF last year, and I am very proud of the pioneering work that was done by the companies who participated. The good news is that even though WMF is ending, the work on interoperability continues in other organizations.”
The ISMA, as well as the MPEG-4 Industry Forum and the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium, are named in the e-mail as organizations working to test media interoperability.
Wireless streaming media company PacketVideo Corp., which founded the WMF, said the group decided to cease operations because it had completed its objectives. The WMF was formed to focus industry attention on wireless streaming media standards issues, because other standards groups were not addressing the matter.
“The WMF basically accomplished its mission: focusing the attention of standards bodies on streaming, helping standards bodies define standards, demonstrating interoperability between various vendors and bringing content companies to the table to incorporate their views,” PacketVideo said in a statement. “WMF was never in a position to issue standards of its own.”
Ziv Eliraz, vice president of business development for wireless streaming media company Emblaze Systems Ltd., said the WMF was a good way to kick start work on wireless multimedia standards issues. Emblaze was also a founding member of the WMF.
However, Eliraz said, other standards groups such as the 3GPP soon began dealing with the same issues as the WMF, and membership in multiple groups became redundant.
The WMF was founded about two years ago, and members included Cisco Systems Inc., Hitachi, Intel Corp., NTT DoCoMo, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
